Liberty. It’s a simple idea, but it’s also the linchpin of a complex system of values and practices: justice, prosperity, responsibility, toleration, cooperation, and peace. Many people believe that liberty is the core political value of modern civilization itself, the one that gives substance and form to all the other values of social life. They’re called libertarians.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Yes, Congress Is That Bad

America's unprecedented political paralysis is undermining the country at home and abroad.

BY THOMAS MANN, NORMAN ORNSTEIN

The two of us have each been immersed
in Washington politics and policymaking for more than 43 years -- and we have
never seen them this dysfunctional. Our concern about the direction of
America's political system motivated us to write a blunt new book, It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How
the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism. The title was deliberate: The American political system
was not designed by its framers to look pretty or smooth. It was designed to
be, and usually is, slow-moving, fractious, and at times maddening. The old saw
that one should never look at sausages, or laws, being made applies fully to
the United States. We have lived through many of the most contentious periods
in U.S. congressional history, including the divisions over the Vietnam War and
the presidential impeachment hearings of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. But
this is worse.

Americans are disgusted by much of what they see in
Washington. Congress is deadlocked, and the two major political parties are
ideologically polarized and engaged in a permanent state of war.
Problem-solving and compromise have given way to pitched doctrinal battles and
obstruction at any cost. Even the perilous state of the economy has been
insufficient to break the political stalemate. As the public loses faith in the
government's capacity to solve pressing problems, the U.S. Congress garners the
lowest approval ratings in polling history -- a dismal 10 percent this past
summer.
What has gone wrong? Two sources of dysfunction are
central to the current impasse:
The first is a mismatch between the checks and balances
built into the U.S. system and the extreme polarization now separating the two
major political parties. By constitutional design, U.S. policymaking moves
slowly; the president cannot dictate what happens in Congress, and legislators
use separate procedures in the House and Senate that then must be reconciled to
write law. In the past, eventual compromise was the standard outcome, at least
when some legislators worked across party lines. Not anymore.
The Democratic and Republican parties
have been moving apart ideologically since the 1970s, but in the past 10 years
this has dramatically accelerated. For the first time in the more than three
decades since National Journal began compiling vote ratings for the U.S. Senate, the
tallies for the last Congress showed that there was not a single Democrat more
conservative than the most liberal Republican; the center, in other words,
cannot hold -- because it has disappeared. Instead, American parties now resemble
parliamentary parties: Party leaders crack the whip, and fewer members are
willing to flout orders and compromise. The result: gridlock.
The second major dysfunction has to do with the asymmetry
of this polarization. The Republican Party has become the home of ideologically
extreme insurgents who shun conventionally understood facts, evidence, and
science, and scorn the very idea of working out compromises with a legitimate
political opposition. This radicalized GOP is now willing to use all the levers in the constitutional system even if it
means delay and deadlock.
In a parliamentary system, a fiercely oppositional
minority party is to be expected. In the American system, it cannot work. With
the Republicans deciding to use the filibuster in the Senate as a routine tool
of obstruction (they have resorted to the filibuster with a frequency in the
last three years unprecedented in U.S. history), passing legislation now in
effect requires not a majority but 60 votes out of 100. What's more, any
legislation that manages to pass under those conditions, taken without broad bipartisan
consensus, divides the country and is seen by many as illegitimate or
ill-advised. That is the story of Barack Obama's first two years in office.
Democrats, who were in charge of both the House and Senate, pushed through a
wide range of measures from health-care reform to economic stimulus to
financial regulation, but the minority made a concerted effort to delegitimize
them.
What came after was even worse: The
2010 midterm elections produced a divided-party government, genuine gridlock,
and the least productive Congress in memory. This year saw the enactment of
only 83 laws, a quarter of them naming post offices or making other symbolic
acts. Of course, quality is more important than quantity (whatever else the
famous "do-nothing" 80th Congress did, it passed the Marshall Plan). In the
case of this 112th Congress, however, the quality is as abysmal as the
quantity; the most significant public-policy action was the debacle surrounding
the debt ceiling, which resulted in the first credit-rating downgrade in
America's history. Now, following that reckless hostage-taking of what should
have been a standard legislative act, a totally unnecessary "fiscal cliff"
looms, threatening another recession. The problems here are not redeemable with
quick fixes because the divisions are tribal and the problems are as much
cultural as structural.
This lethal combination of forces has serious implications
not just for America's ability to solve its problems; it also poisons America's
standing in the world -- its ability to project its values abroad, garner the
trust and respect of allies, and serve as a role model for nascent democracies
and a counterpoint to autocracies.